Yanks win; Proctor struggles

Short post from me tonight on the game. We’ll have the WPA graph in the morning. Good work all around tonight. Alex Rodriguez is in the Zone with a big, fat capital Z. It’s something special when a player of his caliber enters this other-wordly hitting zone. I would think that no one will pitch to him soon.

Nice to see Andy Pettitte step up tonight. His success tonight and the Yanks’ overall play leads me to believe that the bad, cold weather had something to do with the Yanks’ lethargic opening week. Baseball is a warm weather sport. No team should play in 35-degree weather or the snow. Just as Indian fans.

Finally, a quick note about one of my favorite relievers. I’ve always loved Scott Proctor’s Stuff. His mid- to upper-90s fastball and complimentary breaking pitches made me a believer, and last year, he delivered on the goods. He also appeared in over half of the Yankees’ games and threw a career-high 102.1 innings.

But tonight, he threw 11 of his 17 pitches out the strike zone. He was pulled after 0.2 innings of work in what was then a seven-run game. On the short season, he has just 4.1 innings under his belt â€” small sample size, I know â€” but has given up four hits and three earned runs. His K:BB ratio, nearly 3:1 last year, is actually 1:2 this year. I just hope he wasn’t ran into the ground last year.

It’s not going to take much for Joe to move Vizcaino ahead of Proctor on his depth chart. Hope he pulls it together soon. His velocity was down at the game I went to, he topped out at 93 mph, could be something physical.